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Research Quest In Your Classroom

Research Quest is a series of free online investigations created by the Natural History Museum of Utah for middle school teachers and students.These investigations engage your students in a variety of virtual museum activities designed by and featuring our all-star team of scientists and educators. The investigations will not only challenge your students with a real-world, phenomenon-based scientific mystery, they will also model how research scientists search for evidence and how they use critical thinking to answer scientific questions.

Next, your students will explore digitized museum collections and data to gather their own evidence for the research question at-hand. Depending on the investigation, your class might observe the nooks and crannies of a 3D image scan of a dinosaur jaw or examine aerial photos of pine trees to research the impacts of change in a montane environment. Throughout their work, your students will record their evidence and reasoning in their Research Assistant Notebooks, and test their ideas by sharing them with their classmates.

Research Quest provides an effective way for teachers to increase student critical thinking skills and science literacy through inquiry-based instruction. The different investigations are facilitated by a scientist and help students to use observation and research to write evidence-based arguments.

Melissa Mendenhall, Alpine School District, Science Specialist and Instructional Coach

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